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the Complete Review
the complete review - fiction



Overstaying

by
Ariane Koch


general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

To purchase Overstaying


Title: Overstaying
Author: Ariane Koch
Genre: Novel
Written: 2021 (Eng. 2024)
Length: 166 pages
Original in: German
Availability: Overstaying - US
Overstaying - UK
Overstaying - Canada
L'Hôte - France
Die Aufdrängung - Deutschland
from: Bookshop.org (US)
  • German title: Die Aufdrängung
  • Translated by Damion Searls

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Our Assessment:

B+ : neatly unsettled and unsettling

See our review for fuller assessment.



Review Summaries
Source Rating Date Reviewer
Financial Times A 10/5/2024 Niamh Donnelly
Süddeutsche Zeitung A 8/11/2021 Miryam Schellbach
The Telegraph A+ 1/4/2024 Luke Kennard
TLS A 19/4/2024 Nina Allan
Wall St. Journal . 25/10/2024 Sam Sacks
Die Zeit . 12/10/2021 Nicole Seifert


  From the Reviews:
  • "So many novels have been written about immigration -- what it means to leave home and install oneself in a foreign land, what it means to be left behind -- that you might think there’s nothing more to say. But then you read Overstaying by Ariane Koch. (...) (T)he novel takes these themes and transforms them into a strange, brilliant fever dream. (...) It ought to outlast the current conversation about these issues. Given its intelligence, humour and originality, there’s no doubt it will." - Niamh Donnelly, Financial Times

  • "Diese Situationsanordnung zeigt auf lakonische Weise das ganze emotionale Spektrum einer Gastgeberin, die zwischen Aufnahme und Ablehnung, zwischen gastfreundlicher Liebe und unwirtlichem Hass hin- und herschwankt. Sprachlich flankiert ist die Lakonie von einem Hang zum leicht verschrobenen, doppelbödigen Vokabular zwischen schweizerischem Idiom, Spaß am Antiquierten und vielen Kafka-Anspielungen. Damit liest sich Die Aufdrängung wie eine Allegorie und Groteske zugleich. (...) (E)in intensives, im besten Sinne rätselhaftes Debüt mit philosophischer Schlagkraft" - Miryam Schellbach, Süddeutsche Zeitung

  • "Overstaying becomes a bizarre and beautiful psychodrama about hospitality, control and domination. (...) That Koch’s novel seems to take place half in the “real world” and half in a Leonora Carrington painting is not so much a distraction as essential to the composition: the balanced exag­gerations that transfigure reportage into literature. (...) Novels like this aren’t about plot, per se, but Koch establishes such an engaging offbeat dynamic, and ends each short chapter on such a deliciously provocative lyrical flourish -- aided by Damion Searls’s supple translation from the German -- that you race through, desperate to find out the next small act of cruelty or indignity." - Luke Kennard, The Telegraph

  • "In eschewing realism in favour of a more fragmented style, the author reveals an interest not so much in character as in identity, and how porous and insubstantial the self can sometimes seem. (...) Overstaying is a short novel of huge ambition. Much of its beauty lies in its arresting use of language, the unruly juxtaposition of images that ought not to cohere but somehow do, jolting us from our complacency towards a more vital understanding of the world. Damion Searls's translation from the Swiss German is lucid and precise." - Nina Allan, Times Literary Supplement

  • "Ms. Koch, a German-language Swiss author, writes with a refreshing taste for the absurd, carried into English in a translation by Damion Searls. She also has a keen sense of irony, as the housebound characters do so little that the book itself begins to outstay its welcome, its dawdling cuteness soon growing exasperating." - Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

  • "Die grotesken, traumartigen Bilder, die sie in ihrem ersten Roman verwendet, beschrieben in nüchterner, präziser Sprache, erinnern nicht zufällig an Kafka, daran lassen die zitierten Motive insbesondere aus Die Verwandlung keinen Zweifel." - Nicole Seifert, Die Zeit

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       Overstaying is largely set in the narrator's small hometown. She lives by herself in the gigantic old family house, but it's not hers; "I only superintend it to make sure it doesn't fall apart" and she lives with the constant worry that her siblings will return and displace her.
       She also admits:

     The fact is, all my life I've longed to go away but then I've never left. The fact is, I've been thinking about leaving and talking about leaving my whole life but I'm still here. I am the oldest fossil of all, and I hate this small town so much that I'll have my revenge on it by never actually leaving, even if I constantly act like I am about to.
       Her life does change, however, when she takes a visitor into her home. He is someone from another place, who suddenly showed up in this town:
     In the place where the visitor came from, he no longer is. In the place where he was, there is now only a non-him.
       He is a strange presence and character, at times treated -- and acting -- more as if he were a pet than a human. He has all manner of quirks; he's decidedly odd. The descriptions of the visitor and his behavior veer into the surreal, even as the narrator also seems to want to impose a rigid clarity -- at one point beginning to compose a rulebook, "a set of rules and regulations that will encompass, if possible, every point the visitor is expected to comply with". (Predictably, her plan falls short: "By the time I've finally written all the house rules down, the visitor has already broken new ones".)
       While on the one hand she finds: "he brings the whole world here to me right at home", she also finds herself unmoored; one of the longer chapters is a simple litany of how things have changed, including:
     Since the visitor's arrival, I've constantly forgotten who I was, who I am, and where I belong.
       A sense of threat also looms over everything here -- with the pyramid-shaped mountain overlooking the town an ominous backdrop to this: "remote and increasingly forsaken place" -- not least because:
Sometimes its shadow points straight at my house; moving slowly it impales my house, swallows it up entirely, and wraps it in black.
       The narrator believes: "If the visitor truly is an illness, there is no cure", but in fact he is only one manifestation of something much larger. It is also only a stage in the narrator's life and the course of the novel; in the novel's closing turn, things have changed dramatically again (and the narrator is completely unmoored).
       Told in short chapters -- most only two pages or so in length, and some only a single sentence long ("Luckily I'm not crazy enough to believe in love") -- Overstaying is a neatly unsettled and unsettling novel. Much here is just slightly off, but the narrator makes it sound real and plausible enough, shifting between the quotidian -- drinking at the local Roundel Bar -- and the very strange. The narrator's description of some of her interactions with the visitor are typical for her general engagement (and lack thereof) with the world around her:
I try to forbid, too, the visitor from talking, especially as long as he doesn't have anything interesting to say. What he says flows right past me, running as I picture it straight into the drain, which is soon going to be completely clogged up with his hairs. The visitor has the problem of not mastering the language, for instance he gets idioms mixed up or uses the wrong word endings, to the point where I get tired of having to figure out what he means. I have let the visitor talk a lot, at great length, although in a language I don't know.
       A few reminiscences -- from childhood; about family; about a former boyfriend -- give some sense of the character as well, but the narrator remains -- as she does also to herself -- elusive.
       The short chapters -- the scenes and observations -- are often amusing, as well, and it all makes for an engaging and agreeably discomfiting read.

- M.A.Orthofer, 16 September 2024

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Links:

Overstaying: Reviews: Other books of interest under review:

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About the Author:

       Swiss author Ariane Koch was born in 1988.

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© 2024 the complete review

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